While not the kind of woodworking I hoped to do this weekend, it was work with wood. The wife was home this weekend and started ragging on me about what a pit the place is, well duh, I spend most weekends up in WY working on the place there.
So anyway, we really needed to scale back the forest in the front yard, as you can see, the front yard only extends about 30' from the front of the house, and in there we have a Silver Maple, 3 Austrian Pines, 3 Aspen, a Colorado Spruce, a Russian Olive, and a raft of shubs, bushes and a juniper hedge across the front.
From the street, all you can see of the house is the garage.
First I had to trim the hedge, the new hedge trimmer made short work of that, but then the wife decided that 2 of the Austrian pines, (like I told her when we planted the damn things) were just too close to the house. So here's the trick, to drop 2 pine trees that are over 30' tall, right next to the house and not do any damage to the house or the surrounding trees.
I can tell you, I did some head scratching on this one.
I ended up lopping and sawing off all of the limbs I could reach from my ladder. Then I climbed my fat a$$ up on the roof to skin the rest of the tree as high as I could reach. Then I topped the trees, (sawing off the top 5 to 6 feet), by reaching up as high as I could with my bow saw. Here I had to notch the trunk on the side I wanted it to go, then do a back cut, sawing down at an angle to intersect the notch while pushing outward on the upper part. Luckily, no wind and the tops went right where I wanted them to go.
Then after tying ropes off to the upper part of the trunk left standing, I climbed back down off the roof, back up the ladder to take the next 10' or so. Again, notching as before and this time with the wife pulling on the line, I dropped the next section of trunk right into the yard without hitting any other trees.
Finally using the chain saw, now that I'm on the ground working, and again with the wife pulling on a line I'd tied around the upper part of the trunk, I dropped the remaining trunks, about 12' or so, and again dropped them without damage to house or yard.
Here you can see how close the stumps are to the house.
The second tree trunk, all 3 pieces.
The pile of logs from the first tree. About half way up, this tree's trunk split into 2 trunks.
I spent the rest of the day and all day yesterday, cleaning up the limbs and piling up the logs. 2 trees dropped, with no damage to the house or surrounding trees or shrubs.
Thanks for looking.
_________________
Slow is Fast, Fast is Slow
Violence may not be the best option, but it IS an option
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